Why I started writing daily on LinkedIn

This is my story of why I chose to write a post every day on LinkedIn. Hopefully it will inspire a few to think about it as well. Even if it only makes one person think, I have always achieved something with this.

Until a few days ago, my LinkedIn account actually only existed because you kind of have one. I logged in, switch to LinkedIn Learning and that's it. But I started writing on LinkedIn a few days ago, and I try to write one post each day. To draw a conclusion from the handful of posts is thus premature, but I want to explain why I started. It took an article by Tim Denning to get me to use LinkedIn more. Let's not kid ourselves, I won't reach the 50M views soon. For me, it would already be a success if 500 people read one of my posts. As always, you have to start somewhere small. The headline from Dennings article I liked the most was "I didn’t create a dumb personal brand". I was happy to read that, because the approach is spot on, and I was even happier to see that I'm not the only one with that attitude.

What am I writing about?

I had an idea very quickly and, as is often the case, the idea was databases. I've been working with MySQL for a long time, and started building an ElasticStack recently. A not insignificant part of my work in the last years was the modernization and optimization of MySQL databases. I noticed that the same mistakes were made again and again, which cost performance in the end. That's why I want to cover these in LinkedIn posts and in my blog so that a few less people will have to deal with the results of these mistakes. After all, the beauty of knowledge is that it becomes more when you share it. I don't think you can exploit this property of knowledge enough.

Why do I write?

Of course, one wonders what this effort is for. Posting something on LinkedIn every day takes time, and writing a blog on a regular basis takes even more. If I reduce the time I spend lying on the sofa watching my favorite show for the umpteenth time, it's a good trade-off. Isn't it? I don't think I'll ever make a significant amount of money doing this, at least not directly, but the question is, what about indirectly? By indirectly, I mean through contacts that you can perhaps make in the long term. Maybe an interesting offer comes in because someone reads the posts or the blog. Or you learn something in discussions with interested people. Can you replace this knowledge from discussions with expensive workshops? I don't think so. Last but not least, I think you also learn a lot through writing. With many people you see an improvement in style and after a short time people also become much faster and more organized. I would like to achieve that as well.

I hope you enjoyed the article and I'm looking forward to writing many more. Most of them will be about databases or other topics from IT operations, I promise.